


What makes a person real?

by perfectcosima



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-03
Updated: 2014-12-03
Packaged: 2018-02-28 01:53:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2714582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectcosima/pseuds/perfectcosima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wrote... LaFlashdrive. Someone take computers away from me, I don't even ship this. Anyway, it's angsty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What makes a person real?

What makes a person real?

 

It’s the sentence you want to type into every search engine you come by, the question that presses deeply on your mind. Is it a consciousness? Memories? A physical being you can wrap your arms around?

 

J.P. has one of those, two on a good day, and you never realized how much you would miss the third, how you would grow apart from your rock, your lifelong friend, your Perry.

 

Can you still love someone if you don’t know if they’re real?

 

It seems like it. Every time you talk, you grow closer, grow happier, grow lonelier. One time you forgot to upload his new memories from your phone to his mainframe, and your heart hurt so badly when you realized that he might not be more than bits and pieces, a sentient software that has latched onto how humans live, how humans love.

 

How do you know if a person is real?

 

You’ve never told him your doubts…at least not that he remembers. Just another spot of guilt eating away at your soul as you wipe the drive, pretending that no conversations had occurred since the last time you uploaded his memories to the library. It felt like you were killing him, and you never want to do it again. Unless he asked you to again, asked you to make it so that he didn’t remember his doubts, didn’t remember the fact that you doubted him, the fact that neither of you truly knew whether he was real.

 

Is that what makes someone real? Indecision? Confusion?

 

That would certainly make you realer than most.

 

Perry was there for you when you came home from vacation last month, crying over your stolen bag, the flash drive within containing all of J.P.’s memories from the week before. When you talk to him, it’s confusing, with memories of conversations so fresh in your mind so unknowable to him.

 

You tell yourself it’s fine, people have relationships with people with amnesia and memory disorders all of the time. You have it lucky.

 

Except there’s that one question in you, lingering, eating away at you.

 

Is he real?

 

  



End file.
